


Never The Same River Twice

by bmouse



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Groundhog Day, M/M, Temporal Anomaly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-12
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-12 00:20:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3337541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s Garak’s last day on the station, over and over again. Julian Bashir can’t let him leave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. n

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tinsnip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinsnip/gifts).



> Disclaimer: my memory of the later seasons is increasingly hazy but the story is still spoilery in a general way. Posting a 90% done WIP chapter by chapter for accountability and because I miss writing these two.

_“You can never step in the same river twice.”_ \- Slavic proverb

 

On an indistinguishable end-of-the-war-day like any other he looks up from his research to see that the shop, the corner of it barely visible in across the Promenade from the Infirmary, is shuttered and dark. _Well, this sequencing thing has gotten away from me_ he thinks, but the chronometer insists that it’s only 3:17pm, station time. 

He’d woken up, to wrinkled covers he doesn’t remember disheveling. With smooth, odorless station air blowing across his face, the same way he’s woken up for nearly seven years. There was no warning that today would have this kind of weight.

There is an old-fashioned paper sign taped in front of the shop. Hand-written. Trust Garak to be excellent with calligraphy the way he is with an amazing, truly suspicious volume of things. His brain is stalling, he doesn’t want to read it. 

“Due to a change in circumstances “Garak’s Clothiers” is now closed, and will remain so forthwith. Thank you for your patronage for these many long years.”

Julian Bashir slips his satchel off his shoulder and lets it drop. 3 PADDs, an old fashioned notebook, a datarod, a tricorder, backup cells for the tricorder - 10 kilograms, its enough to slow him down.

Next he’s running through the halls feet beating frantically against the Promenade not thinking of how undignified it has to look - a blue-and-black flailing, galloping giraffe - perfect lungs hyperventilating from stress, not thinking of anything but the most efficient route to Dock 5 in Pylon Three. 

“Did he leave? Errr, did it leave? The ship to Cardassia?” he gasps at the bored-looking Bajoran in dock coveralls.

“The 3:30 freight run? Yeah, four minutes ago. Bombed to hell and they’re still punctual.”

“ _Garak…_ ” Until the man looked at him funny he hadn’t realized he’d said the name aloud.

“Yeah, yeah.” he scratched his nose-ridges distractedly “I think he was on it, hard to miss that one. Good riddance! Not that he was all that bad himself, he was pretty old and toothless as far as they go but, you know. Still, glad to see the station’s spoonie-free at last!”

A Bajoran’s bones are actually slightly less dense than a Human’s owing to the shorter gestation period. _If I hit him right now I would need roughly 87% less effort to break his jaw._ Lately a voice in the back of his head is always calculating the odds, the charge left in his phaser, things like this. It’s pointless, the other man’s out of range now. Something on Julian’s face must have made him back away.

What even happens for the rest of that first day? For the life of him he can’t recall.  
He just knows that he goes to bed feeling like he's been cored and left that way, with his frozen insides floating in a sea of bile, like ice cubes in a bowl of Vic's punch.

Tomorrow he’s going to wake up, wash his face with cold water to try and somehow scrub away the semi-detached wholly professional self he’s been living in. He’s going to write Garak a letter, he’s going to explain.

No he isn’t. He’s going to get busy with something and forget. _That was the end Julian, the end of the first friendship you had here. You running, too late, the heavy docking door. That was it._

 

==================


	2. n+1

He wakes up to wrinkled covers he doesn’t remember disheveling. With smooth, odorless station air blowing across his face, the same way he’s woken up for nearly seven years. Then he remembers what happened yesterday. 

It seems cold suddenly. Cold, impersonal, ugly. All of it. His fingers spider across the thin blanket searching for the second pillow he’d flung away in the night. They find it and drag it over against his chest as he rolls over and curls around it. He doesn’t want to get up. 

_Honestly, Julian. It’s not like he’s dead._

The alarm pings insistently. 

After giving him so many books that managed to give a definite closure to every theme and every character it seemed so awful that Garak of all people couldn’t manage a neat, elegant ending to their association. No, that was the wrong word wasn’t it - to their _story_. Now Julian is left dissatisfied, aching in sympathy for himself the way he would have for a well-liked character. As if his life has suddenly developed an unsatisfying plot twist.

Nevermind. No self-pity allowed, no dramatics. In a moment he’s going to have a shower and put on his uniform and be happy for Garak like he ought to be. It’s not like Julian’s been a terribly attentive friend these past few months. Though Garak _had_ been off liberating Cardassia, and with Kira Nerys of all people...

_And after he got back? And before?_

The water shower helps, though leaving its temporary warmth is harder than he remembers it being. By the time he’s dressed and out the door he’s sure no one can even tell he’s out of sorts. Maybe because he’s thinking too much about that, wasting cycles on ‘how do I look to other people?’ it takes him a while to realize that everything else is also slightly _off_.

A kind of sameness seems to be everywhere: people walking in similar patterns across the Promenade, advertisements flashing the same discounts. The tired smile the nurse at the appointments console gives him as he says “Good morning, Dr. Bashir” is the same. The nurse has even put his hair up in a half-twist again. 

Julian notices things like that. He wishes it was still gathering light ammunition for a bit of harmless flirting but senior staff were encouraged to remember casual details about their immediate subordinates in case one was ever replaced by a Changeling. Maybe his brain has become so under-stimulated by his routine life that it had started caching patterns in his surroundings?

But with a quick sweep around the room he finds enough little innocuous details to make him feel nervous. Two other nurses are huddled together still talking about the recent springball match. Rijel is wearing the same green shoes as yesterday. Her younger sister had given them to her but she’d told him before how they weren’t comfortable enough to wear two days in a row. Outwardly he does just what he had done yesterday: dial in a raktajino, walk into his office, but he places his satchel into a pull-out drawer instead of on top of his desk. Out of sight he zips it open so that he has easy access to the phaser inside. 

_A bit paranoid are we? Well, well, Garak_ is _with me in a way._ he thinks wistfully.

In a window behind his research query he surreptitiously opens the Ops schedule. Is there something going on today? A diplomatic meeting? Anything to make a good target for enemy movements? Then he notices the stardate and blinks. _Calendar’s on the fritz?_ But no, Miles had complained up and down that everything had broken once during his tenure _except_ the station chronometrics. 

A few quick flicks of his fingers bring up some corroborating details: yesterday’s log is missing, yesterday’s patients are scheduled for the afternoon. That old theory Occam’s Razor dictates...

_Oh! I think it might be a temporal anomaly!_

Well that was certainly unexpected and possibly dangerous but also somehow… innocent. This is the sort of thing they’d all been prepared to deal with out in deep space, next to the reality-distorting nexus of the wormhole. Not ranks of Jem’Haddar, not ugly old-fashioned war. How long has it been since it was just something like this?

Long enough that he’s not immediately clear on what to do next. With a bemused smile he sets his brain searching for his Academy Temporal Disturbance Reference Manual (Volume 4). Localized time loops; not having the crew sent back or forward along any one timestream but rather re-cycling an hour or a day sometimes ‘just happened’ (as the textbook was loath to admit) around areas of historic significance. 

_And aren’t we that? The point of the hammerfall, on the doorstep of the Prophets._

Contacting Ops is the next logical step and he’s thinking through his argument preparing to present his data points (though he should probably get a few more besides the patient schedule and Rijel’s shoes...) when he looks out the window and sees that Garak’s shop, the corner of it barely visible in across the Promenade from the Infirmary, is shuttered and dark.

Craning his neck and squinting he can see the white strip of paper fluttering above to the door handles.

_Oh, so he’d left it that morning. And I didn’t even notice until 3:17..._

But if it was the same day then... Garak was still on the station! Julian finds himself standing up, legs tensed ready to spring though he’s not even sure of the direction and halfway out the door he nearly runs over Amnet Kal, one of the Bajoran exchange immunologists. Prudently she takes a few steps back and then from behind the safety of the doorframe brandishes a PADD in his direction.

“Doctor Bashir? The ambassador is ready in examination room two.”

_Oh._ He’d forgotten; the elderly ambassador had been caught in a skirmish months ago and compound fractures in two of her six limbs had healed badly. He remembers it had been tricky to find them on the scans since the breaks had blended in with the geometric segmentation in her outer tissues. Time loop or not he has patients, he can’t just go dashing off. 

Smiling at the sharp, grim ambassador, being both deferential and thorough, not rushing through to concluding what he already knows - all of it is a true test of his professionalism and when the she imperiously folds herself onto the hover platform and is pushed away by her bodyguards he waits until the doors close completely before resting his forehead against them. 

His combadge chimes and he starts, expecting a message from Ops or maybe someone else noticing the loop, but it’s only lunchtime. There was a time when he would hear that chime and his body had been trained as surely as Pavlov’s dog to make a beeline for a specific table. Was it even there anymore? The original one had been used in a barricade against the Klingons years ago and got shot up rather badly but they’d defiantly replaced it with a replica. It didn’t matter, it was not so much the table itself but the expectation of a table and two chairs in the same place. The right one was always his and the left one was Garak’s.

He’d stopped eating so much at the Replimat this past year - away missions, overtime shifts, it was terribly convenient to stay in the Infirmary and chat with coworkers or catch up on paperwork. Maybe because he had no energy left for another performance. Sometimes Miles wanted ‘same-old Julian’ and Ezri wanted ‘professional-mentor Julian’, when it wasn’t ‘Jadzia’s-old-friend Julian.’ Starfleet as a whole wanted ‘prove-you’re-a-safe-Augment Dr. Bashir’ and they were always watching. 

It was a lot to keep on top of, even for someone with his work ethic. To the point where he dreaded lapsing into the old lunch-and-literature routine because... which one would Garak want? ‘Ready-impressed-student Julian’, ‘Argue-the-counterpoint Julian’, ‘Just-ruthless-enough Julian’ from their awkward and dangerous holosuite adventure?

_You were afraid to find out, weren’t you. And it wasn’t just that..._

Well now he didn’t have time to be afraid. All-right, he had a _little_ time until the 3:30 cargo run to Prime but he better get over any nerves quickly and start thinking of a game plan. Go to Garak’s quarters? Intercept him there? No, he’d hate that. And defensiveness was absolutely the wrong starting note for this.

No, he had to show up at the right place and time. The passenger waiting room, where people usually said their goodbyes. Garak would arrive early and he wouldn’t be expecting anyone and then Julian would be there like he’d have wanted to yesterday; providing clear proof that he was still thinking of him. Even though he’d let things...lapse a bit. 

Sure Garak might act affronted at first, and mentally Julian prepared himself to take a few pointed barbs about being unavailable, but it would be The Thing To Do and in his heart-of-hearts he knew the other man would be pleased.

Yes, that was more like it. Now to just triple-check the passenger manifests to make sure... With Odo’s hopefully temporary absence the security around the inbound-outbound schedule was minimal, plain, and unimaginative. Julian almost feels guilty about how few keystrokes it takes. Then again, Garak had always looked fondly on light stalking when it was for a good cause.

There it was, ‘ _E. Garak - one way_ ’ on the Baset departing from Cargo Bay 4 at... 1:30pm?! Boarding would begin any minute now. Julian gives himself half a second to feel furious at the unfairness of it and then he runs. It’s just as undignified as the last time.

Just before the doors to the waiting room he takes a breath or two to smooth down his hair, wipe the sweat off his neck, to stop hyperventilating. Thankfully from what he can see through the glass panel Garak isn’t among the people milling inside. Maybe it’s not too late to make it look like he was waiting here beforehand... _And what if he’s already on the ship? Will you fight your way in? Claim a last-minute mandatory fungal scan or something?_

Julian thinks the answer to that might actually be _If I have to..._ until just behind him someone takes a single loud deliberate step and he wheels around. 

_What on Earth is he wearing?_

Instead of one of his usual colorful tunics or jackets for his last day on the station Garak had chosen a plain, not-quite-flattering shirt with wide panels of greyish-green that echoed his complexion, dark sensible pants and heavy boots. His hair is combed in its usual pristine crest but his scales seem dull and uncared-for, the skin under his eyes creased and darkened. _Has he been ill?_

Julian feels a little queasy with guilt himself. More than just an old friend, he’d been neglecting to check in on one of his worst patients. 

But no, from what Julian can see he’s actually gained weight, not only fat but muscle and all of it evenly distributed - the weight of an athlete preparing for some tremendous physical effort. Of course all the Cardassians through the station lately were in less-than-perfect health and hardly any of them were dressed well. _It’s probably for camouflage, Julian. He’s just blending in._ Still, the sight of this Garak, rather than the one he had been expecting throws him to the point where instead of any number of friendly greetings his mouth is stuck on silence.

Most disturbing of all - Garak isn’t smiling. Not any kind of smile. Not a fake one or an ironic one or a malicious one or even a ‘tedious customer’ one that nevertheless usually made a small crease from his mouth up into his cheek. Unsmiling his face is ageless and remote, the contours of it altered just enough that it could be a stranger’s.

“Doctor Bashir. What are you doing here?” 

“I was hoping to see you, actually.” Julian manages at last. 

“How unexpected.” 

Julian flinches. All-right, all-right, he’ll take that. He deserves it. Naturally Garak notices and a pale echo of malignant light flashes in his eyes before flickering out. But his face slides back into the neutral mask and when he speaks again instead of being openly or even playfully reproachful his voice is flat and tired.

“Then I suppose while you’re here... Won’t you congratulate me? I’m going back, having outlasted my detractors. Most of the individuals who would have upheld the terms of my exile are lost now, queueing somewhere among the eight hundred million dead.” 

He shrugs, elegantly in his un-elegant clothes. “Though I hear the casualty reports are still coming in…”

_Eight hundred million?!_ Julian hadn’t really kept up with what was happening on Cardassia. He’d been busy trying to keep the Starfleet casualties down and frankly avoiding any non-pressing information that could push him from garden-variety depressed into non-functioning but... _Oh God, right… the surface bombings. Really? Eight hundred million!_ It was a number above the point when numbers lost all meaning. Until Julian’s background calculator told him it was at almost 17 percent of the entire species. 

Julian knows he has to say something now, to answer this somehow. _‘I know things must look bleak to you right now, Garak...’_ But no, not that - that’s too patronizing. Quietly he begins to panic because now he’s really been silent for too long, he wasn’t expecting any of this.

At least the pained grimace on his face must be saying something useful because Garak gives him a searching look, slightly softened with a raised eye ridge before he goes on, his voice dry as dust. 

“Oh I’m sure some will say that we've gotten exactly what we deserve... after all, we're hardly "innocent," in all of this, are we? We collaborated with the Dominion... betrayed the Alpha Quadrant... there's no doubt about it, we're guilty as charged.”

Finally, his jaw unlocks. Julian knows the right thing to say to that. 

“Cardassians are a strong people, you’ll survive. Cardassia will survive.”

“Doctor, please -- spare me your insufferable Federation optimism.” There isn’t even a barb there, just resignation. As if Garak’s given up on expecting any better of him.

“Of course it will survive. But not the Cardassia I knew. Too much of it is lost. So many of our our most gifted minds are now drifting ash among the shattered pillars-”

_That’s a quote. ‘A Temple to the Flood’ page forty three, halfway down..._

“We’ll be too busy for the next decade trying to keep the children from starving to even think about music, or literature, or art. And after that... who knows?”

“I'm sorry, Garak. I didn't mean...”

Again Julian watches something he was only rarely privileged to see; Garak visibly collecting himself. 

“Quite all right, Doctor. I really shouldn’t burden you with all of this, it’s hardly your business. You've been a good friend. I'm going to miss our lunches together.”

“I’m sorry, I really am. It’s just... I’ve been too lost in my work. I wish we had time for a few more! But I-I'm sure we'll see each other again.”

And it’s inadequate. Completely inadequate. To Julian’s ears it sounds like child-babble: _I’m very sorry teacher, I haven’t done the work. I’ll do better on the next exam._

And of course Garak reads him like a book because this - his artlessness, his obvious regret, _this_ finally gets him a single worn copy of his old enigmatic smile.

“I'd like to think so. But who can say... We live in uncertain times.”

Then between one second and the next Garak snakes his hand up to briefly squeeze Julian’s shoulder, stepping back so quickly it was like he’d never been in his space at all.

“Forgive me,” he says softly, his eyes pale and wide under the station light “I must be going.” 

And as Julian is just frozen, standing there Garak turns and walks away. A few steps and the heavy boarding door rolls smoothly closed behind him - as graceful an exit as any. 

Julian has an acute sense of deja-vu.

This was worse somehow. A bad ending rather than no ending at all. He stares at the closed door maybe a little longer than necessary and then mechanically taps his commbadge to inform Ops about the time loop. 

From then on it’s all businesslike bustle; giving his report, standing by the console as the engineer on duty runs their scans. A basic lockdown protocol is initiated and through his numbness he thinks _Oh, according to handbook regulation 17-B they should really call back that transport..._ but when the communications officer attempts to hail them they are already out of range.

 

===================================================================


End file.
